Journal

& it ought not to be’. 11 Southey expressed the conventional Victorian censure
against women writers, an opinion which could only increase Charlotte’s
frustration at the limits put on women’s capacity to earn a living and to make
a mark in the world. Ambition in a woman was frowned on and publication
was conventionally seen as egotistical. Yet she was grateful for Southey’s
acknowledgment of her talents and her reply carefully notes that he did not
actually forbid her to write so long as she did not neglect her ‘real duties’.
So she wrote on and the result, as you know, was four famous novels: The
Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. But literary success did not mean that she
escaped further disappointments in life—far from it. Plans for a school of
her own (run with her sisters) failed, and further education in Brussels where
she went to improve her languages and teach, resulted again in loneliness and
deep depression. She felt isolated as a Protestant foreigner in a Roman
Catholic country and the hero-worship she had for her teacher Constantin
Heger, a devout married man, developed into an obsession. Her mental
torture became so great that when wandering the streets and finding herself in
the Catholic cathedral of Sainte Gudule, vehement Protestant though she was,
she had an overwhelming need to make confession—a situation she later used
to powerful effect in Villette. On her return home Charlotte kept the shameful
torment of unrequited love for a married man a secret from her family; but it
manifested itself in the headaches and ‘sickliness’ she suffered throughout the
rest of her life whenever she was under stress. Again her writing provided
consolation and she had her first taste of literary celebrity with her novel Jane
Eyre. But the literary acclaim she had so long sought soon paled beside a
further onslaught of family tragedy. Within a month of starting her novel
Shirley, her three siblings died in rapid succession from tuberculosis: first
Branwell, then Emily and finally Anne within only eight months of each other.
Charlotte was now left desolate. She had lost not only her brother and two
beloved sisters but the main support for her literary endeavours, since the
three sisters had always discussed their plots, style and characters together. She
turned again to her writing and persevered, grateful that she had an
occupation and the courage to pursue it. The novel Shirley (1849) celebrates
the need for activity in women’s lives and their right to self-respecting work.
In Jane Eyre there is a pervasive image of life as a pilgrimage towards that
country ‘from whose bourn No traveller returns’. Hers is the journey of a
passionate young woman who—like her author—seeks self-respect and
independence, who must endure the degradation of being a governess, who
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